Niagara - Don't Take It Personally (Remixes)

Turin based duo, Niagara released Don’t Take It Personally about a year ago. Now they’re receiving the remix treatment from some big names in the experimental electronica marketplace, such as Fennesz, Liars and Gonjasufi. The album proper was an interesting excursion into electro-pop with some dancefloor aspirations, and some mega-trance allusions which never really hit the accelerator. The remixes, as is the fashion, manipulate some of the strengths of the original tracks, refining and accentuating others, and blithely adding a bit of the remixer’s personality in the process.

Take ‘China Eclipse’, for instance. The original sounded like the hyperactive cousin to an Underworld outtake. The Grand Pavilion remix sounds like Dusted’s ‘Childhood’ with its referencing of giggly children and trickle-down water effects. ‘Currybox’ in the Acid Pauli remix adopts the atmospheric minimal techno of say, The Field but the track reduces to something more plaintive, more ambient in the end. The Merchant remix of Popeye is the most successful of the three with its whip-like rattlesnake percussion and overall jungle ambitions. Liars provide the more compelling remix of ‘Else’ which has a drive, a boogie if you like, missing from much else on the album.

Overall, this rather discursive remix album should probably have been packaged up with the original album as a re-issue. Too much on the remix market is just self-congratulatory nonsense from artists who pretend to defer to the original artist, as if it was some kind of toast, but one person’s toast is another’s roast, and the longueurs of Don’t Take It Personally (Remixes) make the whole enterprise seem incognito. As falls Niagara, so Niagara Falls.